Conrad and Classical Imagery in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'

Part 5 of the author's "Tartarus and Promethean Symbolism in Conrad and Hardy: The Return of the Native and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'". In-text citations refer to the linked bibliography
of selected readings.

Whereas Egdon Heath is the classical Hell for
Hardy's tragic heroine, Conrad's 'Narcissus' (its very name
signifying the sin of self-love, its self-deluding and fatal
consequences) is a piece of a different sort of Hell, a
microcosm of European society, travelling towards the
greater Hell of London. While Hardy employs classical
allusions for their visual, poetic, and rhythmic effects and
emotional connotations, Conrad uses such references and
images to create a sensuous and sensory appeal for concrete
and perceivable objects. In The Nigger of the
'Narcissus', Lord Jim , and Heart of
Darkness Conrad is not merely a spinner of yarns but
also an Impressionist painter working with sounds and images
conjured up by sounds to make the reader (as he remarks in
the well-known "Preface" to The Nigger of the
'Narcissus' ) "hear," "feel," and "before al, . . . see" (
NN 13). Conrad does not rely on the intellectual
cognition or decoding of mythological references in the way
that Hardy does, although with the later novelist, too, a
knowledge of the classics will furnish the reader with the
necessary mental bank of images to "see" as Conrad would
have him do. However, one needs neither a specific and
detailed knowledge of Bulfinch's Mythology to
mediate between his consciousness and Conrad's text, nor
even a general acquaintance with the classics to feel the
power of Conrad's imagery. Since Conrad would have his
reader hear and, above all, see, he
fashions his symbols with images that appeal to the senses
first, and to the intellect second.

The Conrad tale is a "shadowy" reminiscence of a
ship "manned by a crew of Shades" (143). To begin with, the
reader apprehends an image of these men that has been
rendered vague and amorphous by the passage of time; then
he sees them as ghosts on a spectre barque. These men
Conrad deems to be "about as wicked as any ship's company
in this sinful world" (73), and, as such, suitable
representatives of humanity on this 'earth in microcosm', the
'Narcissus', "a fragment detached from the earth, . . . [going]
on lonely and swift like a small planet" (35). Thus, the
symbolic level of Conrad's images of ship and crew proves to
be a confusion of the classical underworld ("Shades"), the
Christian Hell ("wicked," "sinful'), and the ship of fools
("ship's company," "a small planet"). In the midst of the storm
that nearly destroys the 'Narcissus' and her human cargo, the
ship becomes a second Noah's Ark, "the last vestige of a
shattered creation . . . , bearing an anguished remnant of
sinful mankind" (p. 53). Although both visually and
connotatively effective, these images seem to lack any
coherent, central design or intent. In fact, in this last image
Conrad has inverted the pattern found in biblical and classical
flood stories (the saving of the innocent and the concomitant
punishing of the wicked) — in Ovid's retelling of the Deucalion
and Pyrrha myth, for example, the couple are spared because
"both had served the gods, and done no ill" (I, 10) — by floating on
the flood those who are damned.

Fit representatives of the worst elements in
humanity are Donkin, a Cockney from London's East-end
slums, and James Wait, a Black seaman from St. Kitt's in the
British West Indies. The former is a lesser devil, a Beelzebub
or Mephistopheles, who "looked as if he had known all the
degradations and all the furies" (20) and, as one of the crew
initially remarks, appears "a blamed sight worse than a broken-
down fireman" (21). Wait, on the other hand, seems to
represent a higher order of evil; his dramatic appearance, for
example, so startles the rest of the crew that the cook
exclaims, "I thought I had seen the devil" (27). An analogue
for Wait is the polluting tug that tows 'Narcissus' out of
harbour, "an enormous and aquatic black beetle . . . [that] left
a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, . . . an unclean mark"
(an Impressionistic image) that is similar to the "smudge"
(25) of Wait's name on the ship's roster. A visual analogue
for Wait and Donkin's towing the ship towards a moral hell is
J. M. W. Turner's "'Fighting Temeraire' Tugged to Her Last
Berth To Be Broken Up" (Plate; Royal Academy, 1839), the evil
pair represented by the smoke- and cinder-belching tug in the
foreground. Sails furled, the 'Fighting Temeraire' is drained
of all colour, in contrast to red and black, twin paddle-
wheeled tug, its reflection, and that of the painting's
discordant, blood-red sky. What is touching in Turner's
painting is the loss of the romance of sail, the passing of a
way of life and its being replaced by more efficient but less
attractive modern technology; what we sense in Conrad' novel
is the concomitant loss of faith, of fidelity to the craft, so
that Wait and Donkin, like Turner's devilish, little tug, are
symbols not merely of the new technological age but of a
new ( and hardly better) morality that attends making men
extensions of a machine.

From Wait's arrival on board Conrad figures the
Negro as a devil or the Devil, to whom the currish Donkin
pays strange homage. Like Milton's Satan regarding his fallen
cohorts in the first book of Paradise Lost, Wait sweeps a
glance domineering and pained over his shipmates, "like a
sick tyrant overawing a crowd of abject but untrustworthy
slaves" (39). In return, the crew serve him "as though [they]
had been the base courtiers of a hated prince" (41). After
Belfast's theft of a pie from the ship's galley, the cook
announces "that wickedness flourishe[s] . . . [and] that Satan
[is] abroad amongst those men" (41), and singles out Charley
"with a patch of soot on his chin . . . [as] a brand for the
burning" (42). Charley's blackened chin associates him with
the polluting tug and the smudged name on the roster; it is
also a mark of Cain, an emblem of the betrayal of the
brotherhood of the craft. Wait's "infernal spell" (41)
gradually overwhelms the spirits of more and more of the
sailors until nearly all shirk their duties and make him
obeisance. "He became the tormentor of all our moments; he
was worse than a nightmare" (46), recalls Conrad's narrator.
Although physically it was Wait who took "enough
[paregoric] to poison a wilderness of babies" (47) — a
suggestion of demonic rites and the worship of Moloch–it is
the crew who suffer the malignant effects of a far stronger
opiate, self-pity. As the narrator concludes, "he tainted our
lives" (48), sapping the men of rectitude and loyalty to the
craft. Even when the ship is in peril during the storm, the
crew misdirect their energies to "trying to keep life in that
poor devil" (72).

As the foregoing paragraph implies, Conrad's
allusions are far more oblique, fragmentary, and
disconnected than Hardy's; indeed, only when connected in
the manner demonstrated do they begin to suggest a symbolic
pattern. Viewed individually in context, these allusions seem
to be nothing more than evanescent impressions. Viewed
collectively and out-of-context, however, they combine to
create a network of meaning, which for example in The
Nigger of the 'Narcissus' endows Wait with Satanic qualities
and renders the voyage a purgatorial experience. Whereas
Hardy states similarities in clear similes, although Conrad
works at both realistic or conscious and metaphorical or
unconscious (Cedric Watts calls this level "symbolic and
allegorical;" p. 179) levels of meaning, he tends merely to imply.

As she approaches her destination (by
implication, Hell), the 'Narcissus' becomes closely
associated with fire imagery. For instance, after the storm
had subsided,

the becalmed craft stood out with its masts and rigging, with
every sail and every rope distinct and black in the centre of a
fiery outburst, like a charred ship enclosed in a globe of fire.
(91)

The image recalls both the spectre ship of
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
the Flying Dutchman legend, but also suggests the exhaustion
of the crew's energies. "That's how them firemen do in
steamboats," explains the sweating cook about their efforts to
save the vessel; "Did you ever see them down the stoke-
hold?" he enquires of Wait. "like fiends they look — firing —
firing — firing — down there" (98). As one who works the
topmasts, Wait may not have had the experience of seeing
firemen working in a stoke-hold, but the implication is that,
as a Satanic figure, he has witnessed many a time the agonies
of the damned.

Later the cook warns the crew of the torments
that await them for their current sins: "Hot! Did I say? The
furnaces of one of them White Star boats ain't nothing to it"
(99). The furnaces on Pacific and Orient and Cunard vessels
would be suitable analogues also, but for Conrad would lack
the connotations of fate, destiny, and doom with which
"White Star" is freighted. As Kay points out, as a symbolist
Conrad selected details from actual experience, including the
names "Wait" and "Narcissus," and employed them in a way
both "integrated and pervasive as we contemplate the
structure of the novel, its characters and theme" (176).
The centre of these images of fire, heat, and furnaces is
Wait's cabin, "hot as an oven" ( NN 100). The Hell
in store for Wait may be that of Judeo-Christian tradition, for
physically he is dying; that in store for the rest of the crew is
the outbreak of mutiny, for spiritually they have been
perverted by the influence of Wait and Donkin. Even
Allistoun, who is convinced that the crew are essentially
hardy-working and trustworthy, concedes that they possess
the capacity to be "Worse than . . . down-right, horned devils"
(108). When they rebel, they sin against the principles of
order and discipline, and are metamorphosed from being "a
troop of wild beasts" (91) to "forlorn souls," agents and
subjects of the Devil and Beelzebub, Wait and Donkin, self-
love and disobedience. The ship has unmistakably become a
hell: "At night, through the impenetrable darkness of earth
and heaven, broad sheets of flame waved noiselessly"
(91).

Also contributing to Conrad's symbol of the
passage of the 'Narcissus' as a
voyage to the realm of the dead and damned are abundant
images of ghosts and the grave. At the outset, Conrad
describes the berths in the forecastle as "resembl[ing] narrow
niches for coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary"
(19), and Donkin as "a startling visitor from a world of
nightmares" (20), Wait being expressly identified later as
"worse than a nightmare" (46). The port of Bombay, from
which the 'Narcissus' sails, proclaims evil through its electric
lamps, which pierce the dark "with a glow blinding and frigid
like captive ghosts of some evil moons" (24). While Conrad
presents the crew's quarters as their grave, he implies that the
city that marks their point of departure is the entrance to the
classical Underworld.

Ironically, Conrad expresses his admiration for
these common seamen in moribund metaphors: the sailors
are "men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life" and
cities, men who perished at sea and "died free from the dark
menace of a narrow grave" (32) on land. Wait's ominous
arrival silences the lively hum of conversation on deck; as he
shakes before them "the bones of his bothersome and
infamous skeleton" (40), reminding them of their own
mortality, Wait blights the crew's spirit of fellowship. Later,
"singers became mute because Jimmy was a dying man" (40).
The imaginations of the crew begin to weave a spell of gloom
about the ship as they are unnerved by their own hung-up oil
suits, which assume the aspect of the "reckless ghosts of
decapitated seamen dancing in a tempest" (53), and by
Archie's great coat, "resembling a drowned seaman floating
with his head underwater" (57). The scene may be borrowed
from vestry scenes in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit
and Collins's Woman in White, but Conrad
has made it his own through its marine context and
psychological realism. Envisioning themselves as dead, the
sailors lose their vivacity and morbidly dwell on death,
serving the death's head of James Wait. "They clustered round
that moribund carcass, the fit emblem of their aspirations"
(104), which they place upon the shoulders of a dying man
who is "becoming immaterial like an apparition" (117). As
Wait has cowed each man into submission through his
counterfeiting the dread image of death, so the crew's
passions run highest when he becomes a living corpse, his
"fleshless head resembl[ing] a disinterred black skull" (117).
"For what the crew see reflected in their black mirrors is the
face of their own Todenangst, a fear of death so
obsessive that, clinging to the preservation of the self's
identity, it negates the spirit of life
itself" (Kay 178).

Appropriately enough, off the island of Flores,
true to the patriarchal Singleton's prediction, Wait dies and is
buried at sea. Almost reluctantly, his
remains go to their final rest off "a sombre ruin [lying] upon a
vast and deserted plain" (122), as if it were not an island at all,
but rather the ruins of some ancient citadel such as Troy or
Sodom, laid low by human pride and folly. "The word 'wait'
can be a noun meaning 'a delay', and the ship appropriately
makes increasingly slow progress until his death, upon which
the vessel spurts for home" (Watts 179). Freed of the burden
(the homophonous 'weight') which Wait's "name itself
suggests" (Torchiana, 30), its idol of self-love gone to the bottom like the
self-obsessed body of Narcissus in the Ovidian myth, the
'Narcissus' returns to normality when it encounters the
British coastal steamers, "migrating and amphibious
monsters" (135). Is Conrad here suggesting the world has
been purged of evil with Wait's burial at sea as it was by the
great flood in Genesis , or is he merely creating a
striking image? Either interpretation is viable.

The connection between 'Narcissus' and Britain
Conrad subsequently clarifies when he compares the island to
an ark, a huge "ship carrying the burden of millions of lives"
(135). As the great island-fortress harbours within its
stronghold such decadence and corruption as one finds in
London, so the 'Narcissus' has sheltered the corrupting
Donkin, whom Wait reviles as "East-end trash" (47). As the
tug takes her in tow, 'Narcissus' is "Shorn of the glory of her
white wings" (136), a possible allusion to the dove that Noah
sent out to find land in the Genesis flood story. Now the
nexus of images shifts as, following the tug "through the
maze of invisible channels" (136), like Theseus following the
thread to the heart of the Cretan Labyrinth, the ship passes
buoys pulling "at their chains like fierce watch-dogs" (136),
suggestive of Hades' watchdog Cerberus. Further up river,
factory chimneys seem to leer down at her as if they are "a
straggling crowd of slim giants" (136), like the Titans whom
Zeus consigned to Tartarus as punishment for their
rebellion.

Once 'Narcissus' has been docked and chained,
Conrad adds with a note of finality, she has "ceased to live"
(137). Her voyage to Hades is complete when her
melancholy crew disembark to re-group later for their pay.

And to the right of the dark group the
stained front of the Mint, cleansed by the flood of light,
stood out for a moment dazzling and white like a marble
palace in a fairy tale. (143)

If this place is not London but Hades, the central
feature is not the Mint but the Palace of Dis. The ritual of
signing names and in return receiving notes and coin is like a
funeral's, each man paying his respects and contributing to
the post-mortem of a voyage like that of the short story
"Youth," a voyage fitted to be an illustration of life. Now that
'Narcissus' has died, the crew ceases to exist as a corporate
entity. The sailors drift off on their separate ways, and belong
to 'Narcissus' no longer. "The sea took some, the steamers
took others, the graveyards of the earth will account for the
rest" (143); their end, like Eustacia's, is oblivion.

Of course, this final succession of images need
not be absorbed into the novel's symbolic pattern. As Cedric
Watts remarks in A Preface to Conrad, "the dominant
conventions of Conradian fiction are secular and realistic"
(179), so that London need not be the classical underworld,
the tug a Charon's ferry, the buoys a multiple-headed
Cerberus, the lowering chimneys incarcerated Titans, or the
Mint Pluto's palace. Conrad makes no specific identifications
because such are not necessary to the creation of the
appropriate feeling and visual effects. Although we may
attribute the gradual deterioration of the crew's morale
through "sentimental pseudo-sentimentality" (Watts 177) to
the same cause as that of Narcissus, unwitting self-love, we
need not make any such connection to realize that the
physical deterioration of James Wait is intimately bound up
with the spiritual wasting away
of the crew. Conrad makes no special demands on his reader
in terms of a priori knowledge, only in terms of imaginative
sensitivity.

Hardy, on the other hand, assumes his reader to
be a member of a 'fit audience though few' which possesses
the background knowledge necessary to comprehend and
interpret his classical allusions. Only one who has read
Virgil's Aeneid , for example, can properly savour
the irony of Hardy's likening Eustacia's appearing before
Clym in the guise of a mummer to that occasion "When the
disguised Queen of Love appeared before AEneas" (Norton
113) to send her son to seek Dido, the Carthaginian Queen
whom he loves passionately, then abandons at the behest of
the gods and destiny. Virgil's story of love and betrayal
becomes a metaphor for the ill-founded affair between
Eustacia and Clym, the flame of which is as intense but also
as brief as that of the affair between Dido and AEneas. "His
passion for Eustacia had been a sort of conserve of his whole
life, and he had nothing more of that supreme quality to
bestow" (304), so that Clym never re-marries, for after the
death of Eustacia he finds himself drained of emotion. While
Virgil's heroine does not want her lover to answer the
promptings of fate by leaving her to found Rome, Eustacia
implores Clym to renounce his plans for becoming a country
schoolmaster.

However, as Hardy often quotes Novalis as
remarking, character is fate, so
that Clym can no more renounce his unrealistic schemes than
Eustacia can abandon hers.
"Hardy's fictive world [is] composed of an indifferent nature,
irresponsible fellow travellers, and exquisite twists of
circumstance" 27 intimately connected with the accidents of
time and place. Eustacia on this desert heath, which is like
something out of King Lear or Macbeth
, yearns to escape across the water, but instead achieves
release through drowning. Unlike the conclusion of a
Shakespearean or Attic tragedy, the end of Eustacia's fitful
drama coveys little catharsis , no ambivalence of
reaction, and no dual sense of mourning for the passing of a
great one but elation at the hero's final triumph over
circumstance. Classical and Elizabethan similitudes seem out-
of-place on Egdon; thus, Hardy's employing grand allusions
to characterize Eustacia only heightens "the cruelty of
illusions" (DeMille 699) that such hyperbolic comparisons
as those to classical myth and legend embody.

She has created for herself an unattainable,
unrealistic ideal as a shield against surroundings which she
feels are not merely mundane, but horrible. The repeated
allusions, then, convey Eustacia's state of mind, her sense of
apartness from the world of Egdon, as well as her sense of
kinship with the beau monde of Paris. By unknowingly
attempting to severe Eustacia's emotional affiliation with that
ideal Clym is unwittingly attempting to assault her sense of
herself. She has cherished an illusion of what she is (Paris) as
well as what she is not (Egdon), and chooses to risk all rather
than abandon her ideal. In that she cannot bring herself to part
with a spiritually-sustaining illusion, Eustacia comes very
close to Conrad's Lord Jim, who deliberately chooses death
with honour over a life of "inherent opportunities for failure"
(DeMille 706).

In Conrad, as in Hardy, ideas come to have a
strange power over the concrete, so that the mistake of
Eustacia and Jude is also the mistake that the crew of the
'Narcissus' make, a failure to value the practical and the real
(the solidarity of the craft) over the sentimental ideal. In
accordance with the genre that he had chosen for his story in
The Return of The Native and the language in
which he had couched his descriptions of his dark heroine,
Hardy gradually transformed her into something she is not: a
tragic heroine in the Greek manner. As a result of her refusal
to compromise her unrealistic aspirations and adjust herself
to normality, Eustacia is a pathetic but hardly a tragic figure.
Hardy becomes the victim of his own allusive framework,
making Eustacia so compelling a figure by virtue of the
images with which he associates her that the reader identifies
with her despite her folly.

Conversely, as Gerald Morgan points out, in
Conrad consciously controls how
characters and things acquire their symbolic meanings, "by
reason of the clarity, rather than the obscurity of their
perceptible aspect" (45). To see as Conrad would have us see,
with the mind's eye, is quite enough to apprehend his
meaning. Despite the classical tale of destructive self-love
alluded to in its title, The 'Nigger' of the Narcissus defies the
sort of rational decoding that one might apply to The
Return of the Native , and yet Conrad never puts the
reader in jeopardy of misapprehending his central figure. The
standard of manly conduct and single-minded determination,
Singleton, is clearly juxtaposed against the deviousness of
Donkin and "the duplicity of the ambiguous James Wait"
(Watts 179). As specific, concrete, and visually appealing as
Conrad's images may be, they do not lend themselves to a
point-by-point correlation to myth, legend, history, and the
Bible that Hardy's do; nor, however, do they engender
ambiguity. For instance, the story of Narcissus and his
reflection as found in Ovid's Metamorphoses has
relevance to Conrad's novel only in so far as the ship's name
is a fitting emblem for the self-love that captivates and nearly
destroys the crew. That Wait dies off a real island named
Flores is symbolically convenient, but his doing so might be
literally true in light of its actual position relative to the
Bombay-to-London shipping lanes.